Role Models: Video Interviews of Women Technology Innovators
Introduction
Why have women stayed away from some technology fields such as computer science? Research tells us that from an early age females are excluded from male-dominated fields in a variety of ways:
- Parents discourage experimenting and tinkering at home.
- Educators rarely kindle and actively extinguish their participation in the sciences
- Male peers enshrine what they feel are their own territories and focus on values different from women.
- Society withholds opportunities by paying lower salaries and varying expectations.
Through educational changes at the k-12 and higher education levels, we can help technology fields evolve to remain desirable to females. If we choose to exclude women from developing technology, many aspects of it continue to lower the status of women around the world.
One change to help this evolution is to provide more role models for girls/women. Adding interviews of women technologists to a world wide searchable database will speed up the time to locate role models, as not all communities have role models available for students to meet and learn how they got their start, what personality traits and skills they may have, and why they continue their work.
The Role Models project includes the following components:
- Online searchable database available without subscription
- Database of existing video interviews of female technologists
- Project Management function for students and professionals to follow best practices when producing new video interviews
- Video production tutorials
- Submission mechanism to add new video files to the database
- List of sources interested in funding the continuing recording of women affecting technology fields.
